SOURCE: Spencer, Janet M. “Princes, Pirates, and Pigs: Criminalizing Wars of Conquest in Henry V.” Shakespeare Quarterly 47, no. 2 (summer 1996): 160-77.

In the following essay, Spencer assesses the justice of Henry's invasion of France and the legitimacy of royal power in Henry V, concluding that the play casts a deeply ironic shadow on the king's reliance on religious authority to validate his conquest and absolve him from responsibility for the deaths and violence that ensue. The critic is particularly interested in the way that Shakespeare's many allusions to the legends associated with Alexander the Great, especially his encounter with the pirate Diomedes, enhance the ambiguous presentation of the morality of Henry's actions.

“The figure who exceeds the law as its master and the one who exceeds it as transgressor,” Christopher Pye explains of Henry V and the traitors Cambridge, Grey, and Scroop, “are indeed bound by an unspoken—perhaps...